I thought I knew what AI coding felt like. My first experience was with GitHub Copilot, and it did about what I expected: a little smarter code completion. Helpful, sure. But nothing that really shook me.

So when I tried Claude Code, I honestly didn’t expect much more. Another assistant, maybe a bit faster. That was my guess.

I was wrong. Completely wrong.

The first time I used it, I just poked around with some simple workflows. Nothing fancy. But then I started writing specs with it, sketching out ideas, planning little systems. And it didn’t just go along—it actually made the process better.

Now I mostly use Claude Code as my pair programmer. Not just solving simple tasks, but talking through plans, asking me questions, even challenging my solutions. It feels like having someone sitting next to me who isn’t afraid to push back or check if we’re on the same page.

The strange part is how natural it feels. The more I work with it, the more I see how good it is at timing—when to ask me to clarify, when to propose something new, when to just listen. It’s like it learned the rhythm of a good partner.

And I’ll admit: I got hooked. I catch myself spending hours with it, bouncing ideas back and forth, almost forgetting that it’s not a real teammate. Sometimes, I even prefer doing specs and architecture planning with it over a human engineer. That surprised me most of all.

I don’t know exactly where this goes. But right now, I’m just enjoying the ride. And maybe that’s the point—sometimes the best tools don’t just help us work faster, they make the work itself feel more fun.